Environmental Thesauri Under the Lens of Reusability

The development of a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) at European level is strategic to answer the needs of environmental management requested by the European, national and local policies. Several European projects and initiatives aim to share, integrate and make accessible large amount of environmental data in order to overcome cross-border/language/cultural barriers. To this purpose, environmental thesauri are used as shared nomenclatures in metadata compilation and information discovery, and they are increasingly made available on the web. This paper provides a methodological approach for creating a catalogue of the environmental thesauri available on the web and assessing their reusability with respect to domain independent criteria. It highlights critical issues providing some recommendations for improving thesauri reusability.